The Liar's Wife (31 page)

Without even knowing how to dream of a man, she realized that Tom Ferguson was the man of her dreams. A partner in looking. A man who looked at her with the same joyful attention with which he looked at great works of art. As she looked at him.

She was the one who'd made the first move. She waited until she was no longer taking courses with him, waited until the summer after her first year. At first he resisted, but she knew that it was just a gesture; he rather easily gave in. She knew all about his wife. She knew he could never be hers, not really. But it didn't matter. For now, they shared everything important. And she knew she was important to him, was giving him something his wife couldn't give. Hadn't he said to her, “It's like a miracle, working with you, guiding you, bringing you along. It's brought me back to life”? Hadn't he said, “It's as if we saw with the same pair of eyes”? He sent her a postcard from the Art Institute of Chicago; he was in the city for a conference. It was of a Titian Danaë: a nude stretched out, yearning, her eyes fixed on the gold about to be showered down upon her from the invisible god in the sky. On the back of the postcard he wrote, “Ever think about acquiring a little dog? But
don't worry, I'm not asking for a golden shower.” It was only then that she noticed, beside the Danaë's bed, a small brown dog curled up like a mushroom. She didn't know what he meant by a golden shower, so she Googled it, and was shocked that such a thing existed, and very glad that he didn't know that she'd had no idea what the phrase meant.

She understood that by sending her the card he meant to say he thought her beautiful. Oh, he'd said she was beautiful, but by comparing her to a Titian he was saying her beauty had the importance of a great work of art. So she began to look at herself in a new way. She'd always liked her hair, but now she began to admire it. Her breasts, which had been nothing but a vexation, now seemed a prize. She wondered what she could do to highlight her eyes' greenness.

For the first time, she was really living away from home, and not in a dorm down the street from the nuns. She felt lucky in her roommate, Leila, who knew about clothes and makeup. Lucky that their coloring was similar. She asked her about eye shadow. Leila was glad to advise and then began to invite Theresa out for evenings with her friends at a student bar. So now Theresa was part of a crowd of people her own age. After a while, she grew bold enough to ask Leila's advice about where to get sexier underwear. She was embarrassed at her sensible underwear, which, as she told Leila (hoping to make a joke of her inadequacy), could have belonged to her high school principal, who was a nun in her seventies.

“Who's the lucky man?” Leila asked.

“No one you know,” Theresa said. She could tell Leila was disappointed not to be taken into her confidence. Leila was studying physics; she'd never have heard of Tom Ferguson, wouldn't have recognized him if she saw him on the street.

He wasn't a popular teacher. Medieval sculpture, 1300–1500, wasn't, as he said, a sexy topic. As a lecturer, he was both dry and sarcastic. Students felt he was reading the same lecture over and over; she'd heard them say that. His graduate students were more complimentary, but he was only working with one other besides Theresa. Graduate students didn't want to work with him because he wasn't a departmental star; he'd written only the one book, which, though highly praised, was thought to be a bit arrière-garde by the more theoretically minded. She
liked to think that most people didn't appreciate Tom as she did, that she was the one who saw his greatness, treasured his brilliance, understood the full implications of his thought. He wasn't afraid to show his enthusiasm for the things he loved, to use words like “greatness” and “beauty.” Even “purity of form.” He had introduced her to Civitali, shown her the polychrome sculpture
An Allegory of Modesty
, which was part of Yale's permanent collection, but not on view. She had seen it, and her heart had been on fire. The seated figure, her knees apart, her face confident, even mocking, her delicate hands indicating a calm certainty, a balance, a sure sense of who she was. She had felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up when she saw it, and the words came to her, “This is mine.”

And later, when they were lovers, it was a joke between them, that Modesty had brought them together, that Modesty had brought them to abandon, to extravagant pleasure, rapturous bodily joy.

With Leila's help, she bought a peach-colored underwire bra, half lace, half satin, and matching bikini underpants.

“Jesus, you're lucky to have those tits,” Leila said. Theresa was shocked to hear someone use the word “tits” in relation to her body.

“They can be a real pain,” Theresa said. “I could never really run without real discomfort.”

“Oh, spare me,” Leila said. “Any woman with half a brain would give her eyeteeth for what you have.”

“It's not true, Leila. I have a terrible time buying clothes that fit.”

But they both knew Theresa didn't really mean it. Once she would have. But not now.

She wasn't very good at going out with people her own age. Some of Leila's friends flirted with her, but she had no idea how to flirt back and Leila agreed that she was, “for some reason, sort of hopeless at it. You just have to relax.”

But it didn't matter. None of those boys mattered. They were boys. She had Tom Ferguson. He was her lover, the man who called her a Titian. Who said the two of them saw with one pair of eyes. She slept
with his book next to her bed. When she was lonely for him, she ran her fingers over his name, embossed in gold on the book's spine.

How could weedy graduate students with earrings and ponytails compare, with their pitiful come-on lines? (“Shall I tell you a dream I had about you last night? I'm afraid it was X-rated.”)

He never said he loved her, and she respected him for that. He made a point of it. “I can't stand saying those words. ‘I love you.' They always sound false, as if I were doing something expected of me. The expected thing. And I've had a bellyful of that.”

He said that was the thing about his parents that was unbearable to him. Why he only went back to Normal, Illinois, once a year. Even the name, he said …

“What drove me around the bend about my parents, what makes them so incredibly different from Amaryllis's parents, is that they assume there's only one way of doing things, one right way, and either they know it or they're terrified that they can't figure it out. It always made me feel suffocated. Whereas, the first time I had dinner with Amaryllis's parents, it was like heaven. People talking about ideas, people from all over the world, in and out of their home, taking their places at the table, living such immensely various lives. The range of possibilities they represented! The range of responses.”

“But of course your parents wouldn't have had the opportunities of your in-laws,” she said.

“There speaks the little democrat, as always in the voice of truth. But my dear, you see, however right you are, and I don't deny for a moment that you are right, nothing you say can stop my sense of suffocation when I'm with my parents, or my sense of pleasure when I'm around intelligent, sophisticated people. However inferior they may be in the eyes of God, who has the good fortune never to be bored.”

She took his words about suffocation to heart. She knew she must be on her guard: never to bore him, never to make him feel suffocated. If she saw that happening, she would make the move to leave, as she had made the move to become his lover.

He often talked about his wife. “She hasn't had an easy time of it. She often feels she was a disappointment to her parents. They were
such stars, you see, in every way, in so many worlds. And I'm afraid that Amaryllis felt she couldn't keep up. It's only recently that she's really found herself. With her weaving.”

“Weaving?”

“Yes, she's wonderful at it, absolutely wonderful.” And he talked about her summers away in Maine, working with “a master weaver.” And Theresa thought: If she's away in the summers, he'll have more time for me.

“It does her a world of good, I think, getting away from here, going to a place where she's her own person, where no one's even heard of her parents. Or me, for that matter. I don't want you to think of Amaryllis as pathetic. She's not pathetic, you know. She's quite a going concern.”

A going concern? she wanted to say. What kind of way is that to talk about your wife? As if she were an investment you'd been afraid you were going to lose money on that seemed to be, just recently, in the black.

She wanted to tell him that it was a terrible way to refer to his wife. And she wanted to ask him not to talk about his wife to her. She wondered if he told Amaryllis he loved her. She was sure he never told his wife she was beautiful. That would have been impossible. She was not beautiful. Not by any standards. Not by any standards in the world.

Theresa had seen her only once, dropping something off at Tom's office. She was much too thin. It had been said it wasn't possible to be too thin, but there were kinds of thinness that were undesirable. Amaryllis's hair was thin and taffy-colored, and she pinned it to the top of her head in a way that looked uncomfortable. The hairpins were too visible; you could too clearly imagine them painful against her scalp. There were thin red veins all over her face. Was she a drinker? And she dressed in vivid colors—ruby-red tunic, sapphire wide-legged pants—that exaggerated her starved look.

Theresa disliked herself for having these critical thoughts about another woman, a woman close to her own mother's age. She wished somehow that he'd arranged it so that she'd never seen Amaryllis. But that, of course, wasn't his fault. She had seen the wife before she was his lover.

Then he insisted on her coming to dinner at his house, the dinner they gave every year for graduate students and particularly serious undergrads.

“I just wouldn't feel right, Tom. I just couldn't.”

“It's important to me to normalize the situation as much as possible. So that if the two of you met on the street, it wouldn't be awkward. I've mentioned you. She knows I think you're an excellent student.”

So I must go through hours of Purgatory to save you a minute of awkwardness on the street, she thought, wondering where the word “Purgatory” came from. Was it from Dante or was it from Sister Imelda, telling her to pray to the souls in Purgatory so she would never oversleep? She hoped it was Dante. She didn't want to be thinking of Sister Imelda now.

The house he lived in wasn't the one she expected. She supposed it should be thought of as
her
house. Amaryllis's house. The house of his wife. She'd found herself, Tom had said, in weaving, and when he said that, Theresa had imagined the woman looking into a tangle of threads and finding an image of herself—her thin, unlovely countenance part of a larger fabric. None of the people who had been important to Theresa had had any respect for the domestic arts. The people she knew—they were all women—feared the entrapment of such things, the distraction from what was really important or, in her mother's case, one more demand threatening her survival. She couldn't imagine that Tom really respected his wife's weaving. She thought it was kind that he pretended to.

Theresa had imagined them living in a converted farmhouse, with exposed beams, old pottery (French or Italian), brought back from his travels: the head of a saint given to him by a grateful collector, perhaps a small polychrome wooden statue, since that was his area of expertise. But the house was modern Scandinavian: light wood and glass, the furniture all white but draped with what Theresa assumed were Amaryllis's weavings, all in what Theresa imagined were called earth tones but which seemed to her only various shades of brown.

Four of Tom's students had been invited, three undergraduates and his other doctoral student, who had just arrived from a research trip to Siena.

“Leif Erikson,” a young man said, thrusting a reddish hand in her direction. At first, Theresa thought it was some sort of geography quiz. Then she remembered that Tom's other doctoral student was named Leif Erikson. He was slight and well made; his feet, though, seemed like doll's feet, too small for an adult; his eyelashes were white; she wondered if he were albino. But no, he was merely very light blond, and his thick glasses, fashionably red-framed, made his eyelashes look even whiter. She couldn't stop thinking of rabbits, and the combination of rabbits and Vikings made her want to laugh, so instead of introducing herself, she simply nodded. But she was glad that she could even think of laughing at him. She'd feared him, jealously. Suppose Tom thought he was better than her.

“I've heard you're disgustingly learned, that's what Herr Doktor Professor says.”

“Oh, no, I've just … I don't know … there are just some things I seem to have under my belt.”

The words “under my belt” made her think of what was under her belt, and she thought of her own body and she wanted to say to Leif Erikson, “Tom is my lover,” and fearing that the words would somehow slip out, she once again went silent.

Where was he? Where was Tom? Shouldn't he be greeting his guests, making introductions, easing the way? Theresa hadn't had much experience at adult parties, or parties of any kind, and her eye wandered desperately around the living room, looking for him. Finally, he appeared from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a pitcher of clear liquids and six glasses, beautifully shaped, and inviting.

“Martinis,” he said, “guaranteed to loosen everyone up. Theresa, you've arrived. Let me serve you.”

Oh yes, serve me, comfort me with apples for I am sick of love, she wanted to say to him.

Amaryllis came out of the kitchen then, carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres. She passed them around: pigs in blankets, pastry triangles, squares of brown bread with smoked salmon and thin fronds of dill.